You Never Know What Information Will Just Fall Into Your Lap

Some very interesting information fell in to my lap about 2 weeks ago.  I don’t know why, but it still amazes me that information can fall in to our laps and that we can find information that is so out of the ordinary!  Information that no one in the family knew about.

A little background…..
In April I did a blog post to celebrate the life of my maternal grandfather James Jacob Hammond (see blog post Celebrating the Life of James Jacob Hammond).

I had learned from the 1910 US Federal Census that following the death of James’ mother, when he was 5 years old, in 1908 he and most of his siblings wound up in a Roman Catholic orphanage (St. Francis) in Dubuque, Iowa.  I got in touch with St. Francis and they were unable to find any records from that time period.  So, dead end.

I had been unable to find him in the 1920 US Federal Census and I never knew how long he had stayed at the orphanage or where he was in 1920. 

I was able to find my grandfather in the 1930 US Federal Census living with his brother Arthur in Brookings, SD.

Then a few weeks ago I was contacted through my account at Ancestry.com with some pretty amazing information!  Someone reached out to me and said that he knew that my grandfather and his youngest brother Joseph had been among the first 100 boys at ‘Boys Town’ in Omaha, Nebraska.  What???  Remember that old black and white movie with Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney?  Hmmmm….My grandfather and his brother Joseph lived at ‘Boys Town’ with Father Flanagan?  Interesting but that was about all I knew about ‘Boys Town’.  What as it?  When did they get there?  Why were they there?  How long were they there? What was it like living there?  Why weren’t the other 2 brothers there?????  Lots of questions.

It turns out this year will be the 100th Anniversary of when ‘Boys Town’ was started by Father Flanagan and they are trying to determine what happened to many of those first boys and let their families know about the Anniversary Celebration.  Oh and he sent me 2 photos of a group of boys (my grandfather is supposedly among them) with Father Flanagan.  WOW! WOW!

I started asking lots of questions, doing research and oh. yea…re-watching that 1938 movie about ‘Boys Town’.  I was given the name of a historian at ‘Boys Town’.  So, I have called and they are looking to see what they can find about my grandfather, his time at ‘Boys Town’, how he came to be there, etc.  This is something I would never have suspected and how grateful I am to this gentleman for reaching out and making contact!  I will definitely keep you posted!

Oh, and now I found my grandfather in the 1920 US Federal Census ……at “Boys Town” in Omaha, Nebraska!  Guess when I was looking in the 1920 Census earlier I had only looked in Iowa…..lesson learned-if you can’t find your ancestors where you think they should be….open your options and look in a broader area.

If you have any corrections or additions or stories to share I look forward to hearing them.

Enjoy the journey,

Debby

San Diego History Center–Genealogy Day

Today the San Diego History Center, located in Balboa Park,  hosted it’s second annual Genealogy Day.  Genealogy Day is Co-sponsored by the San Diego History Center and the San Diego Genealogical Society. 

The featured keynote address was presented by Anne Gillespie Mitchell who is a Senior Product Manager at Ancestry.com.  Anne was very easy to listen to.  She was realistic about researching and was able to make the information she presented easy to follow and practical.  I would definitely like to attend another presentation given by Anne.

Anne gave an informative talk entitled “How do I Know When I am Right?”  This is a question we frequently ask ourselves as we are researching.  There are no easy answers but Anne presented some good basic steps for helping us determine the answer to this question.

Anne talked about:

• gathering the information you have on the person you would like to research
• determining what question you’d like to ask
• developing a statement/hypothesis you would like to prove or disprove
• gathering records from a variety of sources about your question
• determining how reliable the source of the information you have gathered is
• exhausting all the resources you can
• making a judgment call to determine whether you believe your information proves or disproves your hypothesis at this moment in time  (Remember-There may be more information available at a later date that changes what you think.)

Some general research ideas she shared are:

• find someone who is doing the type of research you may be doing (e.g. Swedish ancestry, etc.) and read about the techniques they use
• look for recorded webinars such as Ancestry Academy to find other ideas for searching
• look at witnesses/informants to aid in your research

Anne also presented a valuable workshop entitled “ Finding & Researching Women”.  Those of us doing research on women know all too well the frustration of finding very little information related to our female ancestors.  We can find information but we need to do some digging.

Anne had some good tips and tricks to guide our work:

• research everyone in the family (Cluster Research).  Other family members such as children, parents, siblings may make reference to the woman you are researching.  People generally lived in clusters.
• define who the woman is
• differentiate the woman from other people in the family
• build a timeline of all the information you have on the woman (dates children were born, marriages, birth, death, etc.)
• develop a question you have about this woman
• determine what you want to prove or disprove
• while researching determine the reliability of the information you find
• write a summary of the woman based on your research to tell her story

I think I know just the female ancestor I want to try this on……….more to follow.

A very valuable thought Anne had for us is….when we learn new techniques for researching that we start using today, remember to go back over old research and try the new techniques with that as well.

Anne Mitchell and I

I had time to attend one other workshop today.  There were several other presentations offered but I choose one entitled “Using Newspapers as a Research Tool” presented by Del Ritchard.  While I have a subscription to Newspapers.com and Ancestry.com and I’ve used a few other free sites I was VERY surprised and pleased to hear about a lot of other free sites that I hadn’t thought of or known about, such as;

• Chronicling America
• Google News Archive
• Elephind
• Stanford Newspaper Data Visualization
• ProQuest Historical Newspapers
• …..to name a few

Del did a wonderful job of pointing out many of the features of these sites and some of the ways to use them.


And all of this was before noon.  Great way to start the day!  Now it’s just finding the time to put these new ideas in to practice.
 

If you have any corrections or additions or stories to share I look forward to hearing them.

 

Enjoy the journey,

Debby